SARA LEE ROBERTS: Echoes and Reflections

Sara Lee Roberts is deeply affected by place and experience, not least by the time she spent as an artist in residence at Monet’s Garden at Giverny. 

Her work has been informed by many of her contemporaries; she cites Megan Rooney, Varda Caivano, Cora Cohen, among others.

Lee Roberts is most attentive to the compositional intelligence and understanding of light found in the work of the Old Masters. She often takes a composition, reinterpreting it in an abstract painting - particularly from artists such as Poussin, Titian and Rubens. She has a profound knowledge of materials, having prior experience restoring paintings for museums such as the Wallace Collection and the Royal Collection. She has spoken of being especially drawn to the filtering, ethereal light of Watteau. Although Watteau painted fêtes galantes, a quiet and disturbing sadness often permeates the hazy twilight atmosphere of his works, evoking the transience of time. Lee Roberts’s paintings share something of this sensibility. Her dreamlike, meditative visions possess a depth of feeling and an ethereal luminosity that suggest the fleeting nature of the moment always in movement. 

In her work she removes explicit narrative and descriptive elements, avoiding distractions from what oil paint can uniquely reveal: the abstract musicality of interacting form and colour. Instead she draws upon the underlying structures she observes in historical paintings, interweaving shapes and rhythms into her own compositions, with painterly invention. These paintings draw the viewer into a spatial depth from which a glowing light seems to emerge. The light itself appears to be in motion. Indeed, light is the true subject of the painting. It is a subtle force that pulses through the surface. The painting titled Slow Blue requires long looking for it to come into being in the viewers’ eye. It cannot be easily passed over. Several others have the word ‘dance’ in their title, which could not be more apt as these works evoke a swirl of liveliness.

The luminosity in her paintings arises from the interaction of colours, each one affecting the other. Yet at any moment in the process the painting can collapse. At such moments the artist must remain steady, working through despair until she becomes a channel through which the numinous energy can flow again - a state that can only be achieved when she is completely present. In that state of attention, her gestures become trancelike, and the painting itself seems to breathe, as though alive with the vitality of the moment. It is this energy that the artist seeks to transmit to the viewer, so that experiencing the painting mirrors the inner presence needed to create it.